Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich: A Self, Built and Maintained

In 1937, with her Hollywood career sliding and exhibitors about to declare her box-office poison, Marlene Dietrich took her entire salary from *Knight Without Armour* — $450,000 — and placed it in escrow to help Jews and dissidents escape Germany. In the same period, Nazi officials approached her in London offering a return as the Reich's leading film star. She refused, applied for American citizenship, and renounced her German passport. Everything else — the tuxedo, the lighting, the seventy-year persona — is decoration on that decision.

The Rote Insel, and a Broken Wrist

Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born on 27 December 1901 at Leberstraße 65 in the Rote Insel district of Berlin-Schöneberg. Her father Louis, a police lieutenant, died in 1916; her mother Wilhelmine came from prosperous Berlin jewellers, and remarried a Grenadier officer himself dead of war wounds by 1917. Around eleven, the girl fused her two given names into one: Marlene.

She trained seriously as a violinist until a wrist injury ended any concert career. In 1922 she played violin in a Berlin cinema's pit orchestra and was sacked after four weeks. She failed Max Reinhardt's drama academy audition and worked in his theatres anyway as a chorus girl. Through the 1920s she played Berlin and Vienna stages — Wedekind, Shakespeare, Shaw — boxed at Sabri Mahir's studio when it first admitted women, and drank in the city's drag balls and lesbian clubs. She married Rudolf Sieber in 1923; their daughter Maria was born the next year. They never divorced, across half a century and several dozen of her affairs, most of which he knew about.

Lola Lola

Josef von Sternberg cast her as the cabaret singer Lola Lola in *The Blue Angel*, shot at Babelsberg and released in 1930, and afterwards claimed to have discovered her. "Falling in Love Again" made her internationally famous. Paramount brought her to America to be its answer to Garbo.

Six more films followed in five years: *Morocco* (1930), which brought her only Academy Award nomination and put her on screen in white tie kissing a woman; *Dishonored*; *Shanghai Express*; *Blonde Venus*; *The Scarlet Empress*; and *The Devil Is a Woman*, in which she said she had never looked more beautiful. Von Sternberg's lighting of her face is among the most studied in cinema.

Box Office Poison, and the Refusal

When von Sternberg left, the career fell apart. *The Garden of Allah* and *Knight Without Armour* were expensive and returned little, and in May 1938 American exhibitors put her on the "box office poison" list alongside Garbo, Hepburn, Crawford and Mae West. *Destry Rides Again* (1939) rescued her by inverting the image: a rowdy saloon girl opposite James Stewart, singing "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have."

Aus Anstand

From January 1942 she toured selling war bonds, reportedly more than any other star in America. Then she went to the front. Two long USO tours in 1944 and 1945 took her through Algeria, Italy, Britain, France and the Netherlands, and finally into Germany itself with Generals Gavin and Patton. Billy Wilder said she was closer to the front lines than Eisenhower. Asked why, she answered in two words: "aus Anstand" — out of decency.

Her revue included film songs, a musical saw learned in 1920s Berlin, and a mind-reading act taught to her by Orson Welles. For the OSS's Morale Operations Branch she recorded German-language propaganda songs, including "Lili Marleen," the one number soldiers on both sides loved; she was the only performer who knew what they were for. She received the Medal of Freedom in November 1947, always calling it her proudest possession, and later the Légion d'honneur.

At the war's end she found her sister Elisabeth had spent it running a cinema for the SS officers administering Bergen-Belsen. She vouched for the family, shielded them from prosecution — and then erased them, telling the world for the rest of her life that she was an only child.

The One-Woman Show

The postwar films were good and intermittent: Wilder's *A Foreign Affair*, Hitchcock's *Stage Fright*, *Witness for the Prosecution*, Welles's *Touch of Evil*, and *Judgment at Nuremberg* in 1961, her last real role.

From the early 1950s she worked almost entirely live. Las Vegas paid her $30,000 a week in 1953, where Jean Louis's beaded "nude dress" caused the intended scandal. From the mid-1950s Burt Bacharach arranged and conducted for her, building the act into a full theatrical evening — gowns and swansdown for the first half, top hat and tails for the second, so she could sing the men's songs. When he left, she wrote, "I have worked like a robot, trying to recapture the wonderful woman he helped make out of me."

Her 1960 West German tour drew bomb threats, protesters chanting "Marlene Go Home!" and enormous crowds; Willy Brandt welcomed her. In Israel she broke the unofficial ban on German by asking her audience's permission, then singing "Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind." They gave her the Medallion of Valor in 1965.

Twelve Avenue Montaigne

On 29 September 1975 she fell on stage in Sydney and broke a thigh bone, which ended it. She withdrew to her Paris apartment and spent thirteen years largely bedridden, running up $3,000 monthly phone bills to Reagan, Gorbachev and Thatcher. She let Maximilian Schell make a documentary about her in 1984 on condition that he never film her; the voice-only result was nominated for an Academy Award. She died of kidney failure on 6 May 1992, aged ninety, and was flown home to be buried in Schöneberg, near her mother and her birthplace.

Why Marlene Is Called a Genius

The AFI placed her ninth among the greatest female screen legends of classic Hollywood in 1999. The case has never rested on acting: she was nominated for one Academy Award, for *Morocco*, and never won.

The faculty is self-construction, pursued with an engineer's rigour for seventy years. Dietrich designed a persona and then maintained it against time by technical means — body-sculpting undergarments, tape facelifts under the wigs, makeup, and lighting she specified herself after learning it from von Sternberg. Edith Head thought she knew more about clothes than any actress alive. Dietrich's own account is unsentimental to the point of coldness: "I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men... I dress for the profession." Peter Bogdanovich noticed the result: "She transcends her material... she lends each an air of the aristocrat, yet she never patronises."

The most honest verdict came from Francis Wyndham in 1964, and it contains its own counter-argument: "What she does is neither difficult nor diverting, but the fact that she does it at all fills the onlookers with wonder... To these necessary elements Marlene Dietrich adds a third — the mysterious force of her belief in her own magic." That is either genius or a sustained confidence trick, and Wyndham declines to say which. The sceptic has more: her range was narrow, and it collapsed the moment von Sternberg stopped lighting her. Her daughter's 1992 biography describes a cold, manipulative narcissist. And a woman who could stand at the front out of decency also disowned her sister and denied her existence for half a century. The moral courage was real. So was the self-invention. They were, arguably, the same faculty.

Legacy

Berlin bought her estate for $5 million in 1993 after American institutions declined it: over 3,000 costumes, 15,000 photographs by Beaton, Horst, Hurrell and Steichen, and 300,000 pages of correspondence with Hemingway, Remarque, Coward, Gabin, Welles and Wilder, now held by the Deutsche Kinemathek. Marlene-Dietrich-Platz opened in 1997; the city made her an honorary citizen in 2002. Her memorial plaque quotes her: "I am, thank God, a Berliner."

Achievements

• Commander of the Legion of Honour
• Officer of the Legion of Honour
• Knight of the Legion of Honour
• Notable work: The Blue Angel
• Worked as film actor, singer and autobiographer